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Does my site look drupally in this?

No naming and shaming here, but you know you've seen it. You're browsing around and see something very "drupally" about a site. Suspiciously, you view source or look at builtwith.com just to double check. What was it that you noticed? Was it some odd styling? Can we blame this "drupaliness" on Drupal?

Making a theme in Drupal 7 is surprisingly easy. If you can go with the flow, much of what you want to do can be overridden with CSS. As Laura Scott wrote recently about the Theming Firehose "Theme with the markup you have, not with the markup you wish you had". To its credit, a "blank" Drupal theme in Drupal 7 is very pared down. You can see the results by enabling the core theme Stark. There is a little CSS just to make the page legible, for example Drupal core puts sidebars in their places; and it adds some coloring to tabs to ~make them recede. Ok, they've got a grey background. Stark in Drupal 7 isn't the height of fine design, but it's a good way to see what Drupal comes with out of the box.

The thing is, many designers just stop there, and they leave many areas of a Drupal site unaccounted for. Here are the list of offenses below. I'd like to thank the participants of my little twitter poll. @pcambra, @timmillwood, @DamienMckenna, @gusaus, , @eporama, @snyderc. You might have some additions yourself to add in the comments!

1. Neglecting to design user/register

2. Neglecting to consider all user related forms

3. Neglecting to design for the tabs

The View/edit tabs are often forgotten, but including the design of these will help.

4. Neglecting to customize the design of output from contributed modules

If you add a contributed module, make sure you double check both the markup being output to ensure it's consistent with your theme. And of course, override the CSS classes in your own theme. Many contributed modules include *.tpl.php files to override as well.

5. Neglecting to design for anything else your client might add

Drupal is highly flexible. You may not have expected it, but at some point your client may drop in a table of data right into a basic page. If you don't design for at least the basic HTML tags, you're client will have some really horrible browser default table design. They might make a View with a bulleted list and pop it in the sidebar, where you only expected blocks of text. How is that going to look? Don't forget to design for any new content and markup your client might add.

6. Theming a site with Garland

I'm putting this last because, why kick a theme when it's down? To be fair Garland was a decent theme. And the color module at least made it customizable. It's not a *bad* theme, but if you've got design skills and time, it looks a bit lazy. :/

Why is this happening? How can we stop it?

I think if a designer were to design all aspects of the site functionality from the ground up, they wouldn't forget to design how the user/register page looks. And yet, with Drupal, it's a "given". It comes that way, out of the box. So maybe it's just oversight. There are literally holes in the plans that don't get any design treatment to make it part of a cohesive whole.

Commentaires

I didn't mean my reply to be a knock on Garland per se. But
rather, as Heather mentions, the lack of effort on changing the
default theme is a dead give away as to when a site was built with
Drupal. Same will probably be true of Bartik even though it's a
much better theme. It is distinctive as a Drupal theme once
you've seen it a hundred times.

Don'e feel bad about knocking Garland. I m sure that Garland
understands and is not offended. Drupal 7 makes theming so much
easier and there are so many possibilities that were almost impossible
to do in the past. We all used Garland as our base and styled it from
there, but those days are over. Phew. And now there aren't any
excuses for our Drupal sites to look Drupally anymore. :D

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Use [acphone_sales], [acphone_sales_text], [acphone_support],
[acphone_international], [acphone_devcloud], [acphone_extra1] and
[acphone_extra2] as placeholders for Acquia phone numbers. Add class
"acquia-phones-link" to wrapper element to make number a link.